School vouchers, border bills fall short
Fourth special session begins as Abbott vows to push until legislators deliver on his top priority
Gov. Greg Abbott called state lawmakers back to Austin on Tuesday for the fourth special session of the year, just hours after they had gaveled out of the third without passing private school vouchers or the GOP’s two major immigration bills.
The Republican governor has pledged to keep pushing the House and Senate until they deliver on his top priority: creating a program that allows parents to access public funds to send their kids to private schools.
“I look forward to working with members of the Texas Legislature to better secure Texas and pass school choice for all Texas families,” Abbott said in a statement. The new session officially began at 5 p.m.
The House has long been the primary roadblock to school vouchers, with Democrats and rural Republicans united in opposition.
In the final days of the previous monthlong session, Rep. Brad Buckley, R-Killeen, the lead education policymaker in the House introduced a revised voucher plan with several concessions to critics, including stricter accountability, more money for special education, a virtual schools program and an overall bump to public school funding. Buckley had said he would file the bill when the next session started.
Buckley’s latest measure also would require standardized testing for students who receive funding and kick them out of the voucher program if they have failing scores for two straight years. And it would provide onetime $4,000 bonuses to public school teachers, school nurses, counselors and librarians.
Abbott and House leadership have said a deal is coming, and
some rural Republican skeptics appear open to vouchers in exchange for the right mix of sweeteners. But it remains unclear if the current package, which makes more concessions than past proposals, would win over enough of the two dozen Republicans holdouts to pass.
“I don’t think there’s anyone in this building who knows where the votes are,” state Rep. Matt Schaefer, a Tyler Republican who supports vouchers, said outside the House chamber Tuesday morning.
House Speaker Dade Phelan on Tuesday described the negotiation as “maybe the most difficult piece of legislation in the history of the state of Texas.”
“I’m hopeful that we can all come together and get something done because it’s not just about school choice,” the Beaumont Republican said in an interview. “It’s also about school safety. It’s about public education funding, and it’s about teachers getting a muchneeded pay raise. So there’s a lot in there to discuss, and ideally, we get something to the finish line.”
He said he was encouraging members to “vote their districts” and that it would be a “roller coaster” when the bill was debated on the House floor.
Democrats made clear they would continue fighting the latest voucher bill even with its provisions designed to win over critics. State Rep. Gina Hinojosa, D-Austin, called the proposal “really a 30-page voucher that is embedded in 150 pages of bribes,” mostly to “special interests.”
“The bill is not a concession,” she said. “The bill is a big, universal, ginormous voucher bill, and we are opposed to it.”
Republicans also couldn’t find agreement on most of Abbott’s immigration requests, including a measure that would have empowered police to arrest people they suspected of unlawfully entering Texas from Mexico. That bill, along with a proposal to spend $1.5 billion to continue building a state-funded border wall, fell victim to intraparty feuding between Phelan and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who leads the state Senate.
The two Republican leaders spent the first several months of the year bickering over how to distribute billions of dollars in property tax relief, a rift that was only deepened by the impeachment acquittal of Attorney General Ken Paxton heading into the latest session. Tensions flared again recently as the border bills remained in limbo, dashing hopes of settling differences between each chamber’s version.
The dispute revolved around what to do with people after they were arrested for the new “illegal entry” crime envisioned by both chambers. Senate GOP lawmakers pushed for a version that would jail every migrant arrested, to the “extent feasible,” which Phelan said would be “economically reckless” and amount to a “state-funded hospitality program for illegal immigrants.”
Instead, House Republicans proposed a system where police could drop migrants off at ports of entry and order them to leave the country, with stiff penalties for anyone who refused. But Patrick called the plan “a Texas-sized catch-and-release bill,” while the head of the Senate’s border security committee said it would unconstitutionally usurp the federal government’s power to enforce immigration laws.
The death of the border legislation marked a win, if only temporary, for outnumbered Democratic lawmakers and immigration advocates. They argued that either chamber’s proposal would have dangerous consequences for the state’s growing immigrant population, likely leading to racial profiling and sowing widespread distrust between law enforcement and people of color.
State Rep. David Spiller, the Jacksboro Republican who authored the House measure, called it a “humane, logical and efficient approach to a problem created and fostered by the Biden administration’s prohibitive failure and refusal to secure our border.”
Amid the failure of their “illegal entry” and wall funding bills, Republicans sent a measure to Abbott’s desk that increases penalties for human smuggling. Supporters of the proposal said it would deter cartels from illegally moving migrants across the southern border, while critics said it could end up targeting people transporting their undocumented family members without having a deterrent effect.
Lawmakers also sent a bill to Abbott’s desk that bars private employers from imposing COVID-19 vaccine mandates. They passed a similar ban for public employers earlier this year.
“The Texas Legislature made progress over the past month protecting Texans from forced COVID-19 vaccinations and increasing penalties for human smuggling,” Abbott said in announcing the new session Tuesday. “However, there is more work to be done.”